Boutique of the week: Bowns, Cambridge

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One of the less-trodden beauty spots on Cambridge’s tourist trail is the sunflower-coloured, half-timbered Bowns on Magdalene Street. Characterising the city’s shopping scene as “dreary” in the late 1990s, its owner, Rosalind Bown, a former pattern cutter, decided to open shop in 1999 and has since expanded to include Bis next door. “I have always favoured the high end of fashion: the cut, the cloth and the tailoring,” she says.

A healthy stock of Paul Smith jackets, Margaret Howell silk shirts and Nicole Farhi sleeveless jackets suggests that the Bowns woman likes her classics, but a leopard print skirt by